Personal experience
Having got some experience in internet chatting I moved on to exploring online dating sites. There is a great amount of them nowadays. It was very surprising for me to find out that along with such commonplace things as friendship, love, romantic acquaintance there is such a thing as internet affair. Years ago lovers could correspond for months and months committing their feelings and letters to mail that was far from being very reliable. Nowadays people meet, fall in love and part on the internet and online dating is very popular. They can live really very close to each other. The new technologies turned out to be the source of a new kind of human relations.
A good friend of mine used this online dating service and got acquainted with a lady from Sevastopol. After having corresponded with her for a while he went there to meet her in person. She totally resembled her picture and they came home together. As I was not going to leave my native town I started looking for someone from my town. Having chosen 5 - 6 candidates I wrote a letter to them. The answers were really very curious. When I asked one of them about the reason why they have put their questionnaires on the web and decided to use online dating he said that he was just sitting at work and had nothing to do. So he decided to go in for online dating. In spite of such a strange answer I still decided to meet him in person. Just for the sake of experiment. He turned out to be rather attractive and a good interlocutor but... After a couple of such dates I realized that online dating very much resembles shuffling the cards - you never know what card you are going to get.
But these dates gave me a very valuable experience.
At the same time you should take some necessary precautions.
Never talk to strangers. Of course this is a joke but try not to give your real contact information (phone#, the place where you work, etc.) before you meet the face to face, you can just give your icq # or your e-mail address. The people are absolutely different: some of them are rather eccentric and some are very boring. To be on the safe side you should have an opportunity to stop your relations, so make sure that you really would like to communicate with this person.
Do not have illusions. People are really very different. Some of them cheat you on purpose. It is very difficult to judge about a person without having an opportunity to see the face and to hear the voice of the person. It is also very difficult to estimate the reaction of the person in the course of the conversation. There is only one advice that can be given - be careful.
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