Words on a screen

Internet dating is a strange animal. It's not new to me. I dated online back in the Internet "Stone Age," long before Match.com, Yahoo Personals or True. It has it's pluses and minuses but over all the goal was the same...to meet a nice person you can relate to and hopefully build to something nice, good, maybe long lasting.

What was bad? There was no sorting of prospects. I would "meet" someone online only to discover this fantastic guy lived in Finland. Well, dating someone in Finland when you live in Missouri isn't very convenient. He wrote great letters though.

The good, well, every man I met was at least in college or a professional. Back then the only Internet access available was through college (that's how I got on) or through a job, a PROFESSIONAL job. I wasn't meeting ditch diggers, ya' know...not that there is anything wrong with the honorable profession of providing ditches. The most impressive thing was the amount of responses I would get from one posting...a minimum of 75 men would respond...almost all professionals with the occasional e-mail of someone only talking about sex.

Here's the ambiguous part of maybe it was good, maybe it was bad...there were no photos and just text to read. If you like reading like I do, it wasn't such a hassle. If you are a visual person and want the sorting and bells and whistles we have today, you would be out of luck.

But through all that dating, one still has to ask themselves when does the person on the other side of that message stop being just words on a screen and becomes a human being? I thought that issue would be long gone with photos and personality sorting but apparently it has not. People can text, chat, email for months and when meeting face to face STILL only see an object before them. It is perplexing to me how someone can talk to another human being for so long and STILL break that person down to just a group of body parts.

So what is a person to do when you find that your efforts to connect have resulted in yourself being viewed only as a masturbatory aide? You get up and leave.