Claudia Henkel

As a single girl on the dating scene, going out and meeting people or the right person is rather daunting.

You plan a night out with your girlfriends, and usually it’s not a last-minute decision. The date is decided, the restaurant and the club for a little dancing afterwards. You prepare your outfit and spend a considerable amount of time tweaking your hair and make-up, deny it if you will, but we all know that you have done it before.

Your excitement is overwhelming; tonight might just be the night that you meet your prince charming. A small percentage of us do meet the man of our dreams, date, get married and live happily ever after, but for the larger percentage, the evening is spent drinking too much tequila, moaning about how there are no decent men out there and waking up the next day with an enormous headache, only to repeat the whole thing the next week.

It’s exhausting, and really ladies, do you want to meet a guy that you potentially might marry at a night club? I don’t think so.

So it got me thinking about this whole online dating thing and the amount of dating websites there are out there. Perhaps this is the answer to avoid all those drunken nights out and get straight to the point of getting to know someone.

We use technology on a daily basis for business transactions and keeping in touch with friends, so why not use it to meet people? I must admit I have always been sceptical about placing my picture on a website, with a whole bunch of details and a byline that literally screams “pick me, pick me” but how is this any different from meeting someone on Facebook?

Here you load your whole life onto a profile and people can view it at will. Yes, there are privacy settings, but surely you have accepted a few people that you have never met before because their profile picture is hot. True?

I spoke to a few of my friends and there were one or two who admitted to having ventured on to a dating site. They spoke to their potential “soul mate” for at least two weeks and then met for a drink. Neither of them entered a long-term relationship with their online date but confessed that it was a good experience and would do it again.

The whole psyche that surrounds online dating is rather messed up, in my opinion. How do I know this? I’m one of those pessimistic people that feel if you are loading your photo on to a dating site, it’s because you are desperate and dateless, and, yes, I admit this is a childish view and completely not true.

I have heard many success stories of couples meeting on the internet and pursuing a fabulous relationship. We live in a cosmopolitan world where we trying to make the best out of our careers, keep in shape, socialise with our friends and family and in between all this madness, we have try to find a life partner.

So, for those of you who are single and have the same views as I did on dating sites and have had enough of going to the same places and seeing the same faces, perhaps it’s time to give it a go.

Best case scenario, you fall in love, worst case scenario, you go back to your girls’ nights out.
Send your comments to
claudiah@thenewage.co.za