A Word about Online Personals

By Jayde Johanssen

You've heard the story before. You've witnessed it on the big screen. In Hollywood flicks, like You've Got Mail and Must Love Dogs, the leading man and his female counterpart meet online and they fall in love. Virtual romance blossoms everywhere.

Online dating and online personals are simply the consequence of this lovely thing we call the internet. The World Wide Web brings us humans closer together than ever before. With the explosion of email and instant messaging and Twitter and blogs, it's only natural that people would eventually use these tools to find true love in the online ether.

And while in its infancy taking out online personals and hooking up with strangers across the ether was looked upon as, well, weird, today it's a norm. Millions of people, young and old, across the world, are joining up and logging in to find their true love connection through the world wide web.

Online dating has skyrocketed in the past few years. It's a very lucrative industry. The genius who came up with the idea of charging a monthly membership to look through profiles, is without doubt raking in the dollars.

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.

Users contact each other using on site private messaging. Most dating services allow uses to express emotions via virtual winks, hugs, kisses, etc. Users can then exchange email addresses and phone numbers once they feel ready.

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.

Your true love could be a mouse click away.

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.

Still, you can find romance if you look in the right places. It's easy to separate the bad eggs from the good ones and find your one true love. - 32510

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