An elegant weapon for a more civilised age
This blog post isn't going to be about what you think. Sorry to ruin your journey here if you were hoping for some kind of Star Wars rat hole blog post obsessing about the story arc of Episode 4 of the George Lucas intergalactic train wreck.
This post is about the death of online dating, as experienced by somebody who met his other half on the internet a very long time ago (so tempting to write “far far away”).
In the spring of 2000, a few months after buying my own place and realising that I knew nobody, and had very little opportunity to meet anybody, I posted a profile on one of the early personals sites, and before I knew it was swapping emails with a number of seemingly wonderful people.
There was a tremendous innocence about it allwe were all looking forsomebody but none of us knew quite who that somebody might be. Over the course of perhaps four months I went on a string of spectacularly unsuccessful dates, and was almost on the point of chucking it all in when I ended up swapping horror stories with a girl I had crossed paths with months before. Over the course of a week we met again and again in the late evenings on Yahoo Messenger.
If not for the idiots we met along the way, we would not have met each other, and history would not have taken the course it did.
Back thenbefore online dating became weaponised, we had experienced about a 4 to 1 “idiot” to “nice person” ratio, and the stories provided copious ice breaking material, given that we had both really “given up” by the point we met. We were being ourselvescynical, weary, honest, optimistic, hopeful, and everything else thateverybodyexperiences in normal life. We were not being a “version” of ourselves any more.
It's with a sad heart that I keep reading distant (single) friends writing horror stories about the relationships they nearly had, or the huge swathes of time wasting game players they are having to wade through in order to find “normal” peoplewho increasingly seem to become needles in the dating haystack. This isn't the late teen / early 20s crowd eitherthis is the people who knew a world before the internet.
Maybe the early internet crowd were not so much from a more civilised age, but from a more idealistic branch of society. We were the first group to actively use the web in our daily livesit became a publishing platform to share thoughts, ideas, hopes, and dreams with the world. It became a tool to forge bonds with a far wider community that we (or anybody else) had ever known. Using the internet for selfish means didn't enter any of our heads.
I have a mixed view of the kids in their early 20sit seems to be more obvious than ever that the more conceited, entitled, and false they are, the less chance they have of meeting anybody. Sure, they might look good in a profile photo, or might have a wonderfully written bio, but what's the point of creating a false persona? Do they really think their act will last longer than a few seconds when they meet anybody they have fooled?I guess this is where I would normally sum up the blog post with some kind of over-arching thoughtbut I don't really have one. I'm just blundering along, writing down whatever falls out of my brain. I do like that Star Wars quote though.