By all means, if you want to NEVER meet a person that you've been interacting with on line, exchange IM names and start chatting on line.
Obviously, that's not a hard-and-fast rule; I've met people in the flesh after we did the IM thing; however, the vast majority of people who asked for my IM name I never ended up meeting. Funny how that works, right?
Incidentally, I'll never ask for your IM name, ever. That's because I really don't care for the medium, since people tend to forget that they're having an IM conversation and wander off. But also, I understand that the longer you spend interacting in cyberspace, the less likely it is that we'll actually meet in real life, which is really the rule to be learnt in this post. It seems to me that drawing out on line conversations only reflects inertia or hesitance to actually meet, which doesn't portend a successful coupling, obviously.
So, really this advice applies not only to IMs, but also to long, drawn-out e-mail conversations. Which are great, say, if you don't live within a subway ride of each other. But if you do, why not just get together and have that conversation in real life? Or even if you do live in different towns, why not talk on the phone?
Naturally, I'm not suggesting that you have NO on line interaction. I also find it somewhat strange if a person wants to meet straightaway, with minimal interaction, based only on what we read in each other's profiles. Myself, I've got a great "crazy or incompatible filter", but it takes a couple e-mails for it to do its job. So interact on line only as much as is necessary for your own filters to work. Then, as soon as you're comfortable, get together.
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