With the rise of the internet has come the rise of internet dating. Not only are we able to make use of our anonymity with chat rooms, discussion forums and pornography, now we're able to employ that luxury to our dating prospects as well. The internet offers innumerous and quite complex dating websites (such as eHarmony and lava life) which have a monthly charge for their matchmaking services, and other free sites such as okcupid and plentyoffish.com. Personally, almost all of my friends have registered accounts on one of these four websites, but oddly enough, as much as they're all willing to post their personal information online in hopes of obtaining a significant other, few of them who find success are ever willing to own up to how!

It's a little embarrassing, right? You're a couple, and you're at a swanky dinner party, and the elegant perfect couple holding their wine glasses ask you how you two first met in the presence of all the guests attending. Eyes are all suddenly on you. They expect an elaborate, however cute, tale of serendipitous perfection, and all you've got in response is that you calculated their match percentage on an Internet website, had coffee and the rest is history?

Most of the people who I know who are on Internet websites have also admitted to lying about meeting people from there. So it's not just pretend. It happens. In fact, it's happened to ME.

Now, in a breath of honesty, I met my first real boyfriend on the Internet. I technically met him when I was thirteen-years-old, and he eleven, on GaiaOnline.com, a website entirely devoted to anime subculture and gaming. Yeah, talk about embarrassing to mention to people. To add insult to injury, our first meeting was a few years later, at an anime convention at the University of Victoria. He had flirted and discussed the possibility of dating on MSN when we first "met", but I was repulsed by the notion that a person could experience proper infatuation without meeting them in person, and also, at fourteen and fifteen, convinced that love was, in fact, dead, and certainly not something I was experiencing. Unfortunately, the boy in question was ridiculously easy-on-the-eyes, and one look at him and I completely reversed my perspective, gave up my beliefs and we dated for like eight or nine months after that. Talk about a beautifully woven story to tell people. God. Even back then with the haze of love blinding me to all I saw, I knew it wasn't a socially preferable story to retell. I'll admit freely that I was not honest about how we met to many people, including my parents, family and friends.

It's one thing to meet on the internet too, but it's of another to maintain the interworking of the relationship through means of online chatting or webcamming. In addition to my ridiculous meeting of my first boyfriend, he was also a resident of Nanaimo, a city two hours North of my own, and so the vast majority of our "time together" was spent online, over MSN + Skype, the phone, over our Star Craft, Ragnarok and other videogames we'd play together. I'd get home after school, make myself a sandwich and park my ass in my computer chair, where I'd talk to him, do my homework, write, draw, and listen to music. I was convinced I was in love, in my defence, and assured that as much as the status quo was currently a frustration, in a few years, when we were living together and accessible to one another at every waking moment, the inconvenience would seem all the more worth it.

After doing that, however, I now could never do it again. I am a firm believer that so much of a connection with someone, be it a month-long one or a lifetime-long one, is based more on things you experience when together in the physical world than the internet-shared and ideas in common you can experience in the mental world. As I get older, I feel so much of human connection is almost hormonal, or mental, waves of energy one person sends to the next, inflations of oxytocin, progesterone, testosterone that are heightened and extended in their presence. On the internet, one's mind can be stimulated by another mind, sure, and a lot of (fat) people would argue that it's more important to ensure you have that mental connection first before concerning yourself with physical trifle, but for me, they're both equally important and now that I've had both, I don't think I could go back.

In spite of that conclusion, I also have an account on plentyoffish (and perhaps okcupid, although it's not one I check). On it, there are a lot of people in my local area that contact me. Some people just send me a picture of their cock, and a short message ("WANNA HAVE A GOOD TIME? (;(;(;(;"), others have a bit more taste, such as a lumberjack-turned-professor, who is married, and just seeking a young, bi-curious playmate to "satisfy his wife". Others do have a genuine interest to get to know me, ask me about my 'philosophical views', favourite places to eat, "hey I love the Shins, too, lol, written in the stars"-- but, none of their interest similarities are going to present the same absolute satisfactory spark that I arbitrarily get for a complete stranger sometimes out in the real world. I won't know a thing about them, but my body's chemistry and their body's chemistry find one another compatible for reproduction, and it's almost always mutual. They can be across the street, but once we make eye contact, that's it-- you've hooked them, in a way that no amount of Internet chatting could mimic for you. The “fish” that I always insist to my single friends that are out there only appear truly caught, in my eyes, if my pure, full self in the real world has lured them into talking to me. Online, the process feels incomplete and ingenuine.

Perhaps this is why we refrain from admitting that the person we're with was a person we met on the Internet. You're almost, in that admittance, letting the world know that you settled. You didn't have an intense spark, an arbitrary connection with a stranger, put in the hard work, got to know them, found common ground and proceeded to start the extensive dating process. In fact, you cheated! You SKIPPED those steps by "previewing" a person before making a commitment. The internet has been praised for its capacity to offer us instant entertainment, instant knowledge, instant sexual gratification-- perhaps all this readily-available services are increasing our expectations to have what we want when we want it. Love, or a meaningful relationship, something the Romantics have wrote about being such a labour of intense worth has now been reduced to an instantly-found, percentile with any and all people.