Could Online Dating Be…Safer Dating?

Published on January 30, 2011

Months ago I had watched a segment on CBS that discussed some interesting ideas for making driving safer. Some of these approaches appear to make driving more dangerous but resulted in much safer results. Here’s a video of that segment:

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The video is entertaining so it’s worth watching bue if you don’t want to here are a few points made in it:

• The safest month to drive is February and the most dangerous month is July. The most with the worst driving conditions…ends up being safer?!
• Most car crashes occur on clear, dry days.
• People pay the most attention when conditions appear most dangerous.
• Street signs, which should help us be more careful, actually cause us to be more careless.

The video goes into detail on the last bullet and even discusses a town that removed all street signs and replaced 4-way intersections with round-abouts. The result was that drivers were forced to exercise more caution (or were force to think more if you prefer). As the video points out, one of the intersections went between 2 and 4 deaths a year to 0 deaths since the change was made.

Online Dating: Dating Without Street Signs

Since I run this blog, when I saw this segment it’s probably no surprise that my thoughts turned to the topic of online dating. One of the challenges I’ve been met with from detractors of online dating over the years is that it’s “too dangerous”. This always bothered me in part because it wasn’t my experience (or the experienc of those I talk to) and also because the argument is normally made by people who have never tried online dating.

Photo by Horia Varlan
However, after seeing this video I would argue that the fact that online dating is viewed as dangerous actually makes it far safer! Just as the absence of signs causes drivers to drive better, the exotic or new nature of online dating cause singles to make better decisions (well…at least slower decisions).

Here’s an example: a woman will make a man wait weeks to meet her through an online dating site but might turn around and put far too much faith far too quickly in a man she met at a bar. We don’t trust online dating. Online dating just doesn’t fall within our “risk tolerance” level and so we treat it with extreme caution.

As an example, I get emails from singles asking questions for approaching a dating situation that they would never consider had they met someone offline. The level of mistrust that some people have towards online dating is almost humorous. However, just because some questions of extreme caution makes me chuckle, caution isn’t a bad thing! I’m glad that people take their safety seriously.

And that is really the key: they exercise caution with online dating when they otherwise might not. I don’t believe that online dating itself is safer than other forms of dating but I do believe the general approach to online dating makes it far safer.

But I Read An Article in the Newspaper…

“But I read in the newspaper that some woman in rural Iowa was tricked by a online dating scammer into sending him thousands of dollars!”

I hear this from time to time. Here’s the thing: if you live in New York City, how often are you reading about ANYTHING happening in rural Iowa. If the woman were instead fooled by a man she met in the bar, would you expect to be reading this?

There are bad things happening to people all over the world, some of them happen to be more “interesting” than others. When you read articles like this, it is not an issue of online dating being more dangerous. It is instead an issue of online dating being more interesting to report on.

Safety Through Caution Won’t Last

There is a generation of teenagers today who can’t remember a time when online dating didn’t exist and when this generation reaches their mid-twenties they’ll have spent so much time on Facebook and Twitter and everything in between that online dating will be approached with a great deal of comfort. I expect in the next 10 years we’re going to see continued growth with online dating because of this. However, I also expect we will see the bad decisions that are made in the “real” world made with online dating because the fear will have disappeared.

And in this case, online dating could be more dangerous. But to be fair, it’s not even online dating that’s dangerous…it’s our approach to it! Just as the red light doesn’t make an intersection more dangerous, online dating doesn’t make finding a relationship more dangerous. It’s how likely we are to be careless about the situation that contributes the most to determining how safe we will be.

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Saying online dating is more dangerous than other forms of dating is a myth. However, considering how safe people act because of this myth, I hope the “myth” survives for years to come.

So be safe! Make all of your dating decisions with intelligence and caution!

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