Will Online Dating Replace Conventional Dating?

Introduction

Online dating has been coming on quite strong in recent years and because of that many people now wonder whether online dating will replace conventional dating as the primary way that people do things in the world today. Well, this is not a question that can really be answered easily because answering the question involves inferring things about a number of different people and putting them together into groups. This requires data and since we don’t have data to use, all that can be done is to speculate on what might happen between online dating and conventional dating in two specific areas of the average person’s dating cycle vis-à-vis another person.

Area #1: The Meet and Greet

The meet and great is an area of dating that many people are well aware of. It involves actually meeting the person that you might end up dating later and when you have met that person it then involves getting to know them a little better. With online dating, the meet and greet is accomplished through the process of signing up for a profile, searching other profiles and then communicating with others online whilst in conventional dating it involves going to a singles hangout and meeting other singles by going up to them and striking up a conversation.

The meet and great area of dating appears to be trending firmly in the direction of online dating and the recent effects of the recession of 2008 have just accelerated that trend to the point where this type of meet and great functionality is really better done online than offline. Online dating is cheap (and sometimes even free dating) and it has the potential to create first dates between people that already know quite a bit about each other and therefore know that they are interested in entering into a relationship with one another. For all these reasons and more, online dating is already well on the way to replacing conventional dating in this area.

Area #2: The Relationship

The relationship is the second area of dating and it involves the couple actually getting together and doing the things that couples do. Dating, sex and marriage are three examples of such things and of course the one thing that these three have in common is that they require physical proximity between the two people that have decided to embark on the relationship. For this reason, it is likely that online dating will never replace conventional dating in this manner because online dating is not something that is conducive to physical proximity.

Online Date Conclusion

Based on the analysis that has been done above, the most logical conclusion to draw regarding the futures of online dating and conventional dating is that the overall dating process will eventually evolve into a hybrid process between the two. People will meet, greet and online date and then carry on their relationship offline when it is ready to progress to that stage. This is already what millions of singles are trying to do around the world.