How to establish mutual understanding?
I would like to share one observation with you. If you are interested in your online personals pal, find an opportunity to show him or her how you look like. Send a picture of yourself. It would be even better if you sent different pictures from time to time. Let me explain. Of course, for a relationship the mutual exchange of photos is one of the principles. But people do not just interact with the only purpose of finding a partner for future life together. People search for and find friends, good company, they meet like-minded individuals and they do not really care about satisfying the desire of their correspondent to have a visual image of them, not just a verbal one, which comes through a set of symbols dedicated to programming or earning money through the Web. Such interaction is totally devoid of an emotional background and is completely reduced to a logical perception of messages and to an evaluation of what you have read. So give your correspondents some food for imagination and for visual memory! It is the ideal option for any interesting correspondence interaction that is unlikely to become real. You can carry out an experiment if you ask one of your online pen pals (whom you haven't seen even on a picture) for a photo, and you will see how your attitude to this person would immediately change!
A couple of words about writing to someone who has posted online personals. Let's take a simple example: smileys. If a person is using smileys, you had better use them too. But is he or she is avoiding any symbolic representations of their emotions, you should try to do the same. You could somehow connect through the emotional content of the text, making it playful if your pen pal wrote a playful message to you, or dry if you receive a letter like that. Of course, you do not have to copy his or her style, manner, cues, just like you should not completely imitate the pose of your real-life interlocutor - it looks clumsy. Just be somewhere close by. Try to figure out the manner of your pen pal and do not make him accept yours. It is not about etiquette, it is about psychology. And it works.
I would also like to mention the representative systems: I see, I hear, I feel, I think. You could establish a connection through them as well. For instance, if your pen pal writes "these words sound very right to me", do not reply with something like "I see how close our points of view are". You could remark, for example, "I am very glad to hear this".
I am sure you can evaluate yourself justly when thinking of meeting someone through online personals. You know your weak and strong points. In some ways the other candidates may do better than you, in some ways you will be superior to them. You might study the ways in which other people present themselves and make interesting conclusions. It is obvious that if you feel other people are doing much better than you, it makes sense to try to arrange a real-life meeting as soon as possible. In this case, you would have one very important advantage: you would not be evaluated much like cheese or soap, and chances are that your personality appeal would work. Of course, it is not going to work all by itself, but if you make an effort and learn at least a bit of psychology - why not? However, if you are all positive and great and whatnot, getting a lot of letters every day, you still had better not delay for too long your real-life interaction, or else your enchanted candidates would think the world of you, and then it would all screw up completely. This is just the way online dating works.
|
