Question:
I recently moved to a new city, but I have no idea where to go to meet local people. I’m not big into the bar scene, and I work a lot, so I don’t have a lot of time to try meeting someone anywhere else. I’ve thought about trying online dating, but is it worth the effort? Will I be able to meet local people or is it a waste of time?
Answer:
We think this is a no-brainer positive development. The key thing is that it’s not online dating — dating sites makes it possible to meet local people virtually followed by in-person dating.
Simply considered as online meeting people, it makes a ton of sense. The first step in ending up with the right person is actually meeting the right person, and for something so important in our lives, we’ve had no real system for doing it efficiently and intelligently. For socially weird, anxious or shy people, trying to meet a stranger in public is a nightmare. Why it is horrific even for someone charming and outgoing, it’s a grueling task that requires a lot of luck. The alternative that often happens is meeting someone through friends, which can work, but it’s limiting you to single people your closest friends and family happen to know.
Effective dating definitely needs to take place in person, the same way your grandfather did it, but we see no good reason why you can’t meet local people to date in the first place can’t be systematic and efficient. Sure, there’s something special about the romance of meeting someone in public and hitting it off right away, but that rarely happens. For the most important mission in most of our lives, it makes no sense to crush your ability to meet great people to try a first date with because it’s not as good a story to have met them online. Do you have a friend that goes on two or three first dates every week with people they already know? That’s how you find the right person and good luck keeping up with them if you are meeting people the old-fashioned way. And for people who have no interest in serious dating and just want to find people to hook up with? Online is a much better way to accomplish that too.
As for the current online dating options — they strike us as a good first crack at this by humanity, but the kind of thing we’ll significantly improve on to the point where the way it was done in today will one day seem highly outdated in not the future. Now that the stigma has disappeared, you know this industry is going to race ahead because there’s so much money to be made by whoever can be innovative. Who knows. Maybe sometime in the not so distant future, our children will be able to know who they are going to spend the rest of their lives with, even before they get out of elementary school. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an overreach, but who knows? Technology continues to grow and get more advanced. No one knows what’s in store for us.