Social Media, Friends and Online Dating

Nowadays with all of our fancy technology, almost everyone has a profile on some sort of social media website. We are also always connected to these profiles with our smart phones and laptops. We can never completely get away from these social media sources. This can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. It is good for people to stay in touch with distant friends and family. This is an example of the contemporary view of friendship because the contemporary view is that friendship is flexible and mobile whereas the traditional view is that friendship is fragile. This is because, for example, before all of this social media stuff became popular when your friends would move away you couldn’t really be friends with them anymore because you had no way to communicate with them. I know when I was in second grade one of my best friends moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona and we were forced to communicate by occasional phone calls and the mail. This is a hard way to keep a friendship. We never saw each other and eventually we just stopped talking and we weren’t friends anymore. Now with social media websites like Facebook you can easily communicate with people anywhere in the world. Social media can be used to keeping friendships but can also be used as a form of online dating.

Everyone has groups of friends. For some people one of the groups could be online friends. People meet in chat-rooms or just on social media websites and they become online friends. Some people’s relationships progress even further and that’s where online dating comes in. There are millions of people that use online dating websites, but you don’t have to use an online dating website for it to be considered online dating.  Social media websites make meeting and dating people online possible. To date online there has to be a huge level of trust. This is simply because you don’t meet the person in person so whoever you meet could be lying about anything. When someone lies about anything on his or her online dating profile it is called the deception of online dating. They could lie about something as little as changing their height by a few inches or they could totally lie and have a fake profile where the profile shows it is some gorgeous female when really the profile belongs to a man. You never know these days. It doesn’t make sense why people would lie about themselves if they’re looking for a significant other, but many people do.  This is one of the disadvantages of online dating. When people date via a social media website, say Facebook or Twitter, it can be a little trickier. Those social media sites are not for dating so actually dating on them can seem a little odd, but one of my friends did it. She somehow met her current boyfriend on Twitter. He messaged her on twitter and their relationship was strictly tweets then it became text messages until she got the courage to finally meet this guy in person. They had to trust each other that they were first of all real people and not lying about their entire profiles and then they had to trust each other that they weren’t lying about any of the little things. They had to trust that the pictures they posted were real and not edited and other things like that. For them it worked out, but other people might not be so lucky. Overall, online dating can be a hit or miss kind of situation. It all depends on your level of trust.