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No doubt, you’ve seen it on the silver screen. You’ve heard friends talk about it. Maybe you’ve even thought about taking the plunge yourself. The fact is online personals have become incredibly popular.
If you think about it, it’s easy to trace the evolution of the whole online dating phenomenon. It’s a consequence of email, instant messaging, and social networking. The internet has brought humans together in a way that never was possible before. The natural extension, of course, is online dating. And more now than ever before, people are using the internet to find romance.
At the beginning, online personals seemed just plain odd. It was something reserved for, misfits, losers and cranks. But today, that stigma has been shrugged off and legions of people are taking to the net with the hopes of finding companionship and the ever elusive true love.
Whoever came up with the idea to charge for the service, to cover for allowing people to scroll through personal profiles and connect, must have been a genius, because today these sites have become virtual gold mines.
Online dating really became popular in the early 2000s. That’s when services like Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals first cropped up and took off with a skyward trajectory. In August of 2003 alone, online personals drew over 40 million unique visitors in the United States. In terms of traffic, that’s a huge number.
For those who aren’t familiar with online personals, here’s a short rundown. An online personal is basically a profile, similar to your Facebook or Myspace profile. Usually people include information about their personal interests, their physical attributes (height, weight, eye color, etc), race, religion, smoking and drinking habits, a short blurb or description of themselves, and a sentence or two about what they are looking for in a mate or partner.
Online daters communicate using private on site messaging. They can also send virtual hugs, winks, kisses, etc. Essentially, the gist is that users can look through different profiles, find the lucky lady or lad that sparks an interest, contact them and then eventually meet them in an offline setting, for a date.
Users of online dating sites are sold on the idea of finding their one true love on the internet. For many people, online personals are simply easier. It’s more targeted, precise. Whereas, offline, you go to a club and mingle, hoping that someone at that particular place and time will prove to be date-worthy, online, it’s not so ambiguous. Online you simply take a few minutes to browse through profiles and you choose the ones that look appealing. It’s easy as pie.
And perhaps true love waits just beyond the flickering computer screen. That’s the hope, after all.
Of course the online dating scene isn’t without its pitfalls. Many people tend to fib. They exaggerate their physical characteristics. They put down phony birth dates, they lower their weight, they make themselves taller, blonder, tanner than they really are. Some people even post fake pictures.
But these types of fisherman’s stories can usually be rooted out easily. For the most part, online dating works wonderfully. People really can meet their one and only on the net.
With online personals increasing in popularity, it pays for people to inform themselves with the industry prior to jumping in. Jayde Johanssen offers free online dating advice to help people on their way. You are welcome to reprint this article – but get your own unique content version here.
