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Internet dating - pragmatic solution or imaginative triumph?

By Cireena Simcox - posted Thursday, 13 November 2008


And clouds? Well a build up of cumulous vapours indicated how we should dress for that day and had nothing at all to do with peasant superstitions such as fairy castles. We clamoured for other peoples’ realities in our scant leisure moments, in order to reassure ourselves that our sterile existence was at least on a par with that of everyone else.

But the human animal has, over millennia, proved itself an adaptable beast, and one of the major tools with which we have been indelibly programmed in order to adapt, has been the imagination.

It is our imagination which has led us to explore, to invent, and to innovate. It is the imagination which conjured up a video game or a television program. And, it appears that however much our lifestyles may work to stultify, corrode, dissipate or regiment our imaginations, that small spark remains in order to draw the dividing line, some believe, between us and other forms of life.

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It also appears that the basic instinct for companionship which first led us in from the steppes to prehistoric caves and Neolithic villages and which, in our increasingly separate and compartmentalised modern lives, was apparently thought by many (especially town planners) to be extinct, still stutters to life within us.

Internet dating therefore need not be viewed either as a refuge for losers, nor as a fast-track and unsatisfactory speed-dial to intimacy. It could, instead, be viewed as a sophisticated and entirely linear step in the field of human relationships in the technical age. With our newly-awakened penchant for reality, Internet dating could be said to be a realistic and 21st century solution for those citizens who are unable to participate in traditional rituals attendant upon by-gone mateship ceremonies.

But, even if I am the only one to perceive it this way, it could also be said to be a triumph for the imaginative side of men and women that it has not yet been squashed by the technological, fast-tracked and reality based life many of us are forced to live.

I take heart in knowing that despite the moulds into which modern living has succeeded in pushing so many, some still resist. Straight-laced men in business suits, barking orders from their cars into mobile phones still look for love. Pragmatic women with designer laptop-cases and no-nonsense glasses still long to be cherished. Hard-bitten survivors of disastrous unions who maintain they have done with that side of life forever still dream of relationships that work.

The click of a mouse to an Internet dating site allows possibilities for thousands of people across the world and - construction worker, academic, restaurant worker or entrepreneur - they collectively are enabled to experience that same anticipation that this time, or maybe next time, a scroll down a virtual page might bring them what they seek.

As to the cheats, the doctored photo’s, the white lies? No one goes through life without encountering those, in some form, every day. But in the world of Internet dating, if a young man with buck-teeth and pimples who is ignored by reality can stride across the pages as the tanned and toned hero of his own myths; or a thin-lipped mousy woman with three squalling kids under the age of five can slither through men’s minds as a tempting seductress, will the world tilt on its axis? Will the lives of thousands hang in the balance?

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I am inclined to think, rather, that a little bearability might be brought into an otherwise empty life. I rejoice that the ability to let the imagination soar might save someone from desperation. I am pleased at the ingenuity of humanity in overcoming the seemingly impossible odds that modern lifestyles throw at us to try to stop us ever connecting with each other.

Above all, in a world which seems determined to quash that wonderful capacity of humans to set their minds free to dream, to wonder and to imagine, I consider that Internet dating sites, with great ingenuity, play an integral role.

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About the Author

Cireena Simcox has been a journalist and columnist for the last 20 years and has written a book titled Finding Margaret Cavendish. She is also an actor and playwright .

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All articles by Cireena Simcox

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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