While I was working out at the gym (one of the six times this year I will be able to make that statement), I was reading an article in Marie Claire written by a woman who had dated a guy online for two years – without ever meeting him. Two years! What??!! I can understand maybe two weeks, or even two months if you’re going through a desperate period in your life, but two years is bordering on insanity.
If you’re dating a guy for two years, and you’ve never even met him, then you need to get your head checked. At that point, you should just pull a Jan Brady and make up a boyfriend; call him George Glass and during the holidays, tell your family that he would’ve loved to have been there, but he was visiting his family in Canada. The weirdest part about this article wasn’t the fact that she wasted two whole years on this invisible boyfriend, but she had her friend go to the store where he worked and meet him. Huh?? Her friend came back and said he seemed really nice, so this woman continued to date him online – and that’s when the phone sex sessions began. So, fast forward two years, and this woman still had never met her “quasi-boyfriend”, but somehow this virtual Romeo had gotten her girlfriend’s number and even started seeing her...GASP! IN PERSON!
This woman wasted two years of her life on somebody she never really knew. She goes on to say that it was because she had fear of intimacy and blah, blah, blah, and how she’s still attracted to unavailable men. The “fear of intimacy” excuse seems like total bullshit to me. She dated this guy online for two years because she didn’t have the balls to say: “Hey Fuck Face, you either meet me tonight, or I’m going to block your IM’s.” She questions why he ended up dating her friend, but isn’t it crystal clear that her friend had obviously set higher standards for herself and wasn’t going to settle for some mystery voice over the phone?
The most crucial part of online dating is actually dating the guys! Sure, it’s fun to e-mail each other back and forth, but then you have to meet them in person. If they act all weird when you ask to meet them - then ABORT, ABORT, ABORT. Get out of there and fast. I had a girlfriend who dated a guy online and never met him. He sent her pictures, and then come to find out, they weren’t even him. He had stolen some guy’s MySpace profile pictures. My girlfriend had come across this other guy’s profile by chance. It was one of those strange coincidences.
She called him and confronted him. He made up some lame-o excuse about how he had looked like the guy or something like that. His reason for blatantly lying to her about the man he claimed to be was beyond ridiculous. She kept on asking him to send his real pictures, and he never did. He always had a reason why he couldn’t. She asked if she could meet him in person. The guy lived in NY, or so he said. For some reason, it was always a bad weekend. This went on for a few months. As a friend, I would try to reason with her, but she was lonely and even having the attention of a phantom was better than nothing. She wouldn’t listen to me. I knew, she was going to make her own decisions, and there was nothing I could do about it. I could only watch and hope that she would see through this guy’s façade once and for all. And, guess what? She did.
If you meet a guy online, and you get the feeling he is holding something back or hiding something – then he probably is. There are a lot of terrific guys out there. Don’t settle for anything less than what you deserve. The less your expectations are in the world of dating, then the less you will get. Ladies, set your standards high. Don’t waste your time with guys who can’t even meet you in person. Keep this in mind: being alone is always better than having some fantasy relationship. Boyfriends should be real, flesh and blood people – not ghosts in the machine.
Via Marie Claire