Online Personals
No doubt, you’ve seen it on the silver screen. You’ve heard friends talk about it. Maybe you’ve even thought about taking the plunge yourself. The fact is online personals have become incredibly popular.
Online dating and online personals are simply the consequence of this lovely thing we call the internet. The World Wide Web brings us humans closer together than ever before. With the explosion of email and instant messaging and Twitter and blogs, it’s only natural that people would eventually use these tools to find true love in the online ether.
At the beginning, online personals seemed just plain odd. It was something reserved for, misfits, losers and cranks. But today, that stigma has been shrugged off and legions of people are taking to the net with the hopes of finding companionship and the ever elusive true love.
Online dating has skyrocketed in the past few years. It’s a very lucrative industry. The genius who came up with the idea of charging a monthly membership to look through profiles, is without doubt raking in the dollars.
Popular dating sites like Yahoo Personals and eHarmony have seen their membership rates more than double. Online dating has definitely made it in the mainstream market. Back in August of 2003 over 40 million people visited an online dating site. Today that number just keeps growing.
If you aren’t up to speed with this world of online personals, it may seem like a complete mystery. But its actually pretty simple, and it makes sense. Personals are simply profiles. If you have a profile on a social networking site like Facebook or Bebo, then you already have a grasp of online personals. These are slightly more tailored than regular profiles, however. They include info about your physical characteristics, your weight, your hair color, your ethnicity, your lifestyle choices, your social background, your religion and even your eating and drinking and partying habits. Users usually include a quick description of themselves and they also jot down something about what they are looking for in a mate.
Users contact each other using on site private messaging. Most dating services allow uses to express emotions via virtual winks, hugs, kisses, etc. Users can then exchange email addresses and phone numbers once they feel ready.
Users of online dating sites are sold on the idea of finding their one true love on the internet. For many people, online personals are simply easier. It’s more targeted, precise. Whereas, offline, you go to a club and mingle, hoping that someone at that particular place and time will prove to be date-worthy, online, it’s not so ambiguous. Online you simply take a few minutes to browse through profiles and you choose the ones that look appealing. It’s easy as pie.
Just maybe your soul mate is looking right at you from behind your monitor.
There are some downfalls to internet dating, just as there are in real world dating. Many people tend to exaggerate or out right lie about their looks, their age and their professions.
However, it’s often easy to weed out the liars and find true love.
With online personals on the rise, it pays for people to inform themselves with the industry before jumping in. Jayde Johanssen provides free online dating advice to help people get started.