Ever found that you’ve spent hours and hours talking to someone before actually meeting them only to realise that they are nothing like what you had imagined?
You created an idealised image of them in your head which you see has no bearing on reality when you finally get to meet?
It’s just happened to me and what’s especially annoying is I should’ve known better. It’s happened several times in the past and even several times in the recent past.
This last time I could even see the warning signs. It didn’t stop me.
Unreality bites
“You’re idealising,” I warned myself as we flipped virtual love hearts across the ether at each other.
We were busy admiring each other’s wisdom, sense of humour and general wonderfulness.
“This is all going to come crashing down.”
But even having been there before didn’t stop me getting overly excited about the date.
When I actually met her it took me about 20 seconds to realise I’d been both incredibly right about her and incredibly wrong about her.
She was indeed wise and had a great sense of humour. She had a cute impish smile – just as she did in the photos – and a cool way of dressing.
But when she wasn’t smiling her face had a tight look on it that didn’t seem particularly attractive to me.
Somehow all the photos that she sent me had concealed that she was significantly overweight.
Energy mismatch ahead
And what I hadn’t picked up on from all audio messages, on phone call and many many many WhatsApps was that she had kind of high frequency, buzzing energy that mixed badly with my own more downbeat style.
“What?” she said later in the evening as we ate pizza. “Is something wrong?”
“No.”
“You don’t seem very animated,” she said.
“Actually this is how I normally am,” I said, truthfully.
“I don’t believe you. You’re in a bad mood.”
“I’m honestly not.”
Of course if someone keeps telling you you’re in a bad mood, what happens? You end up being in a bad mood, that’s what.
Many of the problems found with dating app dating are the same as those that you might find in traditional dating – but not all.
One of the most dangerous – and in my case common pitfalls – is this “virtual predating syndrome” as I’m going to call it.
Virtual predating syndrome happens when you get talking with someone you met online and through a dating app and start chatting and… reality fails to intervene.
Soon you find you’re really gelling. it’s like this person really gets you and you really get them. There’s real chemistry happening here.
Virtual chemistry, that is. In the real world nothing is happening. You
haven’t even met yet.
The logical thing in this case would be to meet as quickly as possible and discover if that elusive real chemistry exists.
But sometimes time, logistical constraints or distance – make that impossible.
So you continue talking online until you can actually meet and as you can’t see this person next to you in flesh and blood, your imagination starts to fill in the blanks.
Appearances… and the reality
The first time I tried online dating this was brought home to me in particularly painful fashion.
I’m a writer so I tend to fall into these situations more naturally than some.
It’s easy for a woman to fall for my writerly musings before they’ve actually seen me and perhaps a little harder for them to fall for my physical manifestation.
In this case I’d been on match.com for about 24 hours, enjoying plenty of conversations when one woman really caught my eye.
She wasn’t just pretty but she was quick with words.
She was a dating veteran but I was just escaping from a divorce and I was completely new to modern romance.
We got on so well online that I convinced myself it was almost inevitable we would end up in a relationship.
I began to imagine the cool things we would do together (and the sexy things).
She got swept up in it as well, as much as I did and even ended up sending me some intimate photos.
That only convinced me all the more that we were bound to end up together.
Failing to see the obvious
The signs were clear that she wasn’t into me from the minute we met – if I been able to read them.
But as it was it took about five days for me to realize it.
Now at least I may not be able to stop myself falling victim to virtual predating syndrome but at least part of me knows it is just an illusion.
When the reality falls short of what my brain been imagining I recognize that I just fell into one of my favourite pitfalls again.
In actual fact the dates where I really hit it off at the person I see tend to be fairly spontaneous.
So my vow to myself is to try and meet as quickly as possible if it looks like there might be some chemistry there and not waste too much time on predating conversations.
It all feels a bit like drinking too many margaritas – great fun at the time, not so much the morning after.
In the end it’s a good reminder that it’s the small things that make you really fall for someone – the way they walk or the way a smile spreads across their face.
Remembering that doesn’t make it any easier to find love through dating apps.
But it does make the process more realistic and anything based on truth is better than anything that isn’t.
By Max
