My boyfriend and I met online. There, I said it. It’s out in the open.
However, we still tell people that we met at a bar. Our close friends know the real story, but for everyone else… we give them the bar bit. And then I started thinking about it… and in what world does meeting someone at a bar have LESS of a stigma than meeting online?
Has anyone else here met someone online? What do you tell people? What do you think about going online to shop for a mate? I’m curious as to what the real opinion of society is these days.
LemonVibe 
[Well, I think it’d depend on the online site. Match or eHarmony… eh. Adult Friend Finder… maybe a little sketchier.
For what it’s worth, “Missy” and I met online, and I’m not embarrassed by it. I used to be, but I think online dating is definitely gaining wider acceptance now.
[My cousin met his wife on an online dating site. He was very upfront about it with everyone, and some people were rather… lacking in approval, but once we met her, most of those people changed their minds.
The quality of the relationship should be in the forefront and what matters most, not how it started. Anyone who judges you based on that quite frankly doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about.
[And yes, my avatar WAS the picture on my profile. It was VERY effective.
[I met my girlfriend, of almost 51 weeks, online at PlentyOfFish.
We have no problem telling people we met online because that’s just how things go these days. From there we jump to telling people about the first time we met (in person) and some of the following dates. There isn’t a lot of story in a weeks worth of exchanging e-mails and that’s where you’re still just getting an idea for who the person is (or pretending to be).
I was in the online dating scene since 2004 (mainly using OKCupid to meet people after I had just moved to a new city). At that time I was a little hesitant to tell others (some friends and family) that I was meeting people I met online just because of it being relatively unknown; and all of those ‘To Catch a Predator’ specials.
But now seriously think about it. How often can you watch even television, or read a magazine, without encountering an online dating ad?
This is a topic I actively discuss with people; their thoughts about online dating and even the dynamic between that and meeting someone at a bar. Some have said meeting someone at a bar/club now has a worse stigma. Others (most) say you have a much better idea for what a person is looking for depending on where they do their “hunting”.
If they are at a bar/club, odds are they are just looking for a hook-up. If they are online dating they are probably looking for something a little more serious (especially if it is a paid site). This is not to say people don’t use online sites for one-night-stands and such…they do…but it may be more uncommon compared to bars these days.
Fortunately for me, though PlentyOfFish is a free site, I still met someone looking for something other than a hook-up.
[I guess I’m pretty new to online dating, because I really don’t see a stigma. I think people are finally accepting that it’s here to stay and that it’s viable option. I know so many people who have either met their spouses or are in long-term relationships with someone they met on Match or eHarmony. The “we met in a bar” stories are much less prevalent lately (at least in my social circles).
[In the past few years, I’ve dated several men. I met a successful lawyer, a rich dude who owns a vineyard, and a hot Peruvian on-line. I’ve met many serious duds through my sport, social channels, or bars.
Needless to say, I firmly believe the best quality dating is on-line. When I return to seriously searching for a partner, I’ll go back there. I definitely feel you on the stigma because when I tell a story about an ex from on-line and someone asks how I met him, I still feel uncomfortable revealing the origin even in the past tense. But as more and more of us do the on-line dating thing, I think society’s opinion will ameliorate accordingly.
[I have given online dating a try a couple of times (three, I think, over the course of…7 years?), and the first time I didn’t really meet anyone worth dating and shut down my profile within a month, I think. The second time I met a nice guy and dated him for about six weeks, and then I met someone else in real life and liked him a lot more, so I ended up dating him for more than a year. The third time was pretty fun and I met one guy I liked quite a bit, and we dated for about four months until he broke up with me. By the third time, I wasn’t embarrassed about having met someone online any more, in part because I have two very good friends in serious long-term (one couple is married) relationships with guys they met online.
But. At this point in my life, I’m over the online thing. While I had pretty good experiences with online dating, nothing too crazy or creepy, and generally met really nice guys, I did discover that the way the whole thing works doesn’t fit very well with my personality. I would say, overall, that online dating moves too quickly for me. All of my long term relationships have developed over time, starting out as friends, at least nominally, and then progressing to the point where we are both very sure that we want a relationship with one another. I felt a lot of pressure to commit to one person when online dating, before I was really ready to do that. So, this is maybe more of an answer than you are looking for, but while I think there’s nothing wrong with meeting people online, and I think the stigma is much less than it used to be, I would consider it to be more of one method among many that you can use to meet people, and not a one size fits all answer to the problems of finding and dating compatible people.
[Res! What happened to your avatar?!?
[There is absolutely no shame in meeting online. Sure, when it just started it seemed shady, but now it’s kind of the “it” thing to do. Everyone is stuck to their iPhone, laptop, iPad, etc. so why wouldn’t you meet online? To me, it just makes sense that’s where you would meet. I met and dated a guy I met online for a while and it was a fairly successful relationship. See, when you meet online, you have the opportunity to not waste a ton of time. You know up-front same main points about this person, so you save the time and effort of dating them for months before determining whether or not they are a match. It’s like going through resumes and being able to weed out immediatley who you’d like to interview and who just won’t cut it for the job at hand.
[I met my most recent boyfriend online. I told most of my family that we met through kickball, since we both did play, just different seasons. They would find it odd that I met him online. I told my dad the truth though (he online dates himself). I also told all my friends the truth because many of them have online dated, and even married people they met online. But I still think there is some stigma, although it’s definitely less than it was even 3-4 years ago.
[The stigma’s gone down a lot in the last few years, but it still depends on your circle of friends and community. In NYC, everyone and their mom is on OkCupid (my mother actually IS on OkCupid, only in California), and it’s really not a big deal. One of my favorite bar pastimes is picking out all the awkward first dates that came from various sites, then figuring out which site it came from.
Also, it does depend on the site. But in general, I have no problem telling someone I met my date online. I used to, and I was embarrassed to tell my roommates, but then I eventually let it slip, and they joined up. I think once people stop looking at it as “icky” and realize it’s the same as meeting someone in a bar, they’re ok with it. And really, it’s better than a bar. You can set preferences and flip through pictures. It’s like shopping, only with a slightly more awkward return policy.
[The problem I think is that it eliminates the cute, first meeting story. People want to hear something interesting and unusual. Meeting online doesn’t seem that exciting of a story at first glance. That’s not saying your story isn’t interesting, but for me it sounds almost like a business transaction.
That’s just me. I like a good story. In your position I wouldn’t really care what others thought, but make up a really good story just for fun
[Just because my boyfriend and I met in a bar (kind of), I’m going to start telling people we met online. Actually, I usually leave out the bar bit because I feel like *that* has a stigma attached to it too.
I’m still reading through the comments, but instead of saying, “Oh, we met online,” maybe you could try saying, “Oh, we met on *insert dating website here*.”
I feel like that would have a difference in how people perceive it (although, fuck them if they’re going to be judgmental!) I think when people hear that you met online, they picture seedy online chat rooms and Craigslist casual encounters. By clarifying a legitimate dating website, I think it might help to get rid of some stigma.
Unless you really did meet him on a seedy online chat room (or, heaven forbid, some online forum filled with sex-crazed perverts), in which case….Match.com cover up?