Online personal contact sites are booming. There are contact sites for everybody, regardless of age — for juveniles, students, working people, old people. The collection of chatrooms, dating sites or online partner services offer a highly promising scene.
Michaela Unfried, a psychologist, says that the level of inhibition online is much lower because of the anonymity. ”People become closer much more quickly.”
The crunch is the first personal meeting. This is when the effect can be sobering. Unfried says that after this initial face-to-face encounter, people often wonder how they could have revealed so many secrets about themselves in the first place.
But in general terms, the Internet is a great way of getting to know people, she added. This is also the opinion of 31.1% of the population, according to a survey by the GfK Society for Consumer Research in Nuremberg. The survey was carried out for ”Focus” magazine.
The most important aspects of virtual flirting were given as the irrelevence of region, a lower level of inhibition, the possibility of remaining anonymous, the flexibility of time and the fact that people can get to know each other more quickly than in the real world.
One 35-year-old women, identified only as Erika, has been establishing contacts for some years. She says: ”Every contact has advantages and disadvantages. She says it is positive that the personal profile can constantly be updated.
There are hundreds of chatrooms, flirt sites and on-line partner broking sites, some of which are free of charge and some not. There are special offers for juveniles, old people, farmers, homosexuals and people with certain sexual preferences.
Joachim Hoeflich, a Professor for Communication Science at Erfurt University, says: ”People who chat have to realise that people in reality are different from how they present themselves on the chat-line.”
On the Internet, negative factors are often not mentioned. He adds that it is a myth to believe that only the ”pimply and the shy” search for partners on the Internet. Nicole Schiller, a psychologist who works for an on-line partner service, agrees. She
says her agency’s clients are as a rule in their middle forties.
Many are high-earning academics. Most are ready to enter a relationship and they keep a sense of reality in the search for partners.
She adds: ”A lot is up to luck.”
There are plenty of success stories — such as the couple who met on-line, spoke by telephone once, met and married. They now have a son aged 13 months. – Sapa-DPA