Relationship Experts on the Pros and Cons of Online Dating

With the world growing ever more digital and pandemics keeping us inside most of the time, the world of dating has changed forever. With a new paradigm come new advantages and disadvantages, so it might be a good idea to see how the online world has changed dating for people that are desperately trying to find their significant other.

PROS

Chat in Your Pjs

Gone are the days of having to spend hours choosing the right outfit when you’re going to meet someone. Modern dating requires nothing of the sort, and you barely even have to be awake to find a match these days. Just don’t fall asleep while chatting, that’s still going to be awkward if the other person notices. As long as your profile pictures are decent enough, you won’t need to play dress-up until so far down the dating rabbit hole that odds are you’re going to have a real fun date.

Choose Your Preference

A dating app is basically a huge bar where you’ve told the bouncer that you’re only looking for people of a certain shape, height and age. And if they don’t match the criteria, they’re just not coming inside. Real life sadly still doesn’t have these filtering capabilities. It’s hard to deny that real life would benefit from this kind of feature, pretty much in all aspects.

No Awkward Silence

There’s no such thing as awkward silences anymore! That’s the nice thing about online dating, you’re basically taking it at your pace and keeping the conversation going is a lot less high maintenance. Just text them every once in a while until you can go on the next date and keep the conversation going. Online communication doesn’t have that “I need to reply instantly” quality that normal conversation has, which also allows you to choose your words a bit more carefully if you’d like to.

Guilt-Free Dating

Trying to find “the one” doesn’t mean that you have to only talk to one person at a time. The good thing about online dating is that you can stay in touch with a bunch of people without needing to feel bad about it. Trust me, everyone’s doing it and so should you. You can always stop the other conversations once you’re really sure about one of them, right? Just remove the app once you’re dating seriously and no one will ever know.

CONS

Online Communication

Trying to communicate with a complete stranger in a text-based format is going to lead to at least a couple of misunderstandings. Some people feel more confident talking behind a screen and will turn out to be completely different in real life, or vice versa. It’s a bit of a gamble to try and figure out how the online persona matches up with the real person.

Catfishing

Thankfully, most people are now aware of catfishing and how to spot it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen anymore. For those who don’t know: catfishing is when someone creates a fake online dating profile to be dishonest about their intentions towards you. Often these days it’s just spambots, but sometimes these can be people with malicious intent. This is why it’s usually a good idea to get the conversation out of the dating app as soon as possible. Catfishes can have fake Facebook profiles and the like too, but at least that’s less likely to happen than fake profiles on dating apps.

Too Many Apps

Perhaps the biggest problem in online dating right now: which app do you really have to use? Well, much like in the old days people didn’t know which bar would have the best chances of netting you a partner, you kind of just skim over different apps and hope for the best. And much like in bars, some people use dating apps mostly to have fun and not really for anything serious. Tinder is probably the worst offender in this regard, but even paid services have their fair share of people not willing to settle anytime soon. And all those apps put you in contact with millions of people that just want you for one or two nights, which means there’s probably a lot more muck to go through.