Love Essay
internet dating is big business, and growing in credibility year on year. Parship claims that 50 per cent of single people believe they will meet a suitable partner this way, up from 35 per cent six months ago. A spokesman for the relationship counsellors Relate confirmed to the Times that 'the stigma from dating agencies seems to have gone', and that people are attracted by the advantages of internet dating: having the privacy to 'look around from the comfort of their own home', which means 'you don't have to meet a middleman or go to an actual dating agency office, which takes a lot of courage'.
Of course, there are many areas of life in which the internet seems to be taking over from classified ads and 'real world' agencies - selling cars, finding houses, planning holidays. But the boom in online dating is not simply a more efficient and flexible way of doing things that we would otherwise have done. It reflects a fundamental shift in how people are encouraged to think about their personal relationships and organise their personal lives, with intimacy acted out in public and subject to the contractual norms one might associate with buying a car, a house, a holiday.
The fashion for finding 'love online' represents a redefinition of what we mean by 'love'. No longer is love a spontaneous emotion, a transcendent state of being, a necessary evil on the path to self-fulfilment. Rather, it is recast as a therapeutic virtue - something to be planned and managed in the way one might plan and manage one's career, in the awareness that it might not last forever and moving on is no bad thing.
People seeking love online might not be looking to develop an emotional CV, but that is what the process sells them. And as with many developments online, internet dating indicates some wider social trends. Whether people start out as childhood sweethearts or just good friends, the discussion surrounding love...
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