Mary KennyA large number of people now meet their girlfriends, boyfriends, and spouses, over the Internet. Some marriage and friendship bureaux have gone out of business because Internet dating has become so popular. And it seems logical: the Internet provides a huge pool of people to choose from. And if used cannily, it can also be employed to check the backgrounds of any candidates presenting themselves as dating partners or marriage material.
Other Internet services – such as the website Airbnb, whereby people loan their homes for holiday lets – are remarkably successful. My son and his wife let out their home to three groups of tenants through Airbnb, with no problems whatsoever: he ascribes this to the fact that reputations can now be checked via the Internet, so there is an incentive to be honourable in such deals.
But human relations are different. A study has just been published which claims that married couples who got together via online dating are three times more likely to divorce than those who met for the first time in person.
Dr Aditi Paul, writing in the e-journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking (published by Michigan State University) found that online daters are 28 times more likely to split up within the first year than those who met in person. The study, which involved 4,000 couples, concluded that relationships started in more traditional ways – meeting through friends, family connections or work – were far more stable.
For, despite all the checks that can be carried out, online daters found that initial profiles contained false information. This suggested that trust was eroded, from the start, in an online dating relationship.
The Internet can be a fabulous resource, bringing great benefits into our lives – it has hugely comforted the parents of emigrating offspring, keeping them in touch with sons and daughters in faraway Australia and New Zealand, for example.
But face-to-face encounters are irreplaceable, and a spouse is surely best sought through a network of family and friends. Domestic violence, for example, is surely more likely to arise if you partner up with someone whose background and character are unknown in reality.
The agony aunt Irma Kurtz tells women – “never date a man you haven’t smelled” – which is a sensible mixture of instinct and homeliness. And now the Internet itself has proved the adage.
Why are there no ‘agony uncles’?
As it happens, I chaired a meeting last weekend of four “agony aunts”, who have long experience of answering letters (and now emails) about personal problems, often involving love, marriage and relationships.
One of the questions from the audience was: “why are there no ‘agony uncles’? Why are men never chosen to address relationship problems?” There were various benign answers from the panel, amounting to the view that while there have occasionally been men doing the job, they were rare and women are the natural dispensers of, shall we say, grandmothers’ wisdom.
But some years ago an Irishmen sent me an amusing anecdote about an ‘agony uncle’, which I will try to reproduce here as best I can, in the form of a letter to a man dealing with relationship anguish: Q. “Dear Agony Uncle. I am not getting along very well with my husband these days, and yesterday, when I was driving off to see my mother, the car stalled about a mile down the road so I left it parked and walked back to the house.
“There I found my husband on the sofa in a deeply compromising situation with our next-door neighbour, an outrageously flirtatious blonde. I am miserable – what should I do? Rachel.” A. “Dear Rachel. A car can stall for a number of reasons: have you checked the petrol tank? If the oil gauge is empty, you could have burned out the engine, which will need replacing. Attention should also be paid to the carburettor: a difficult start and poor performance across the throttle range indicate problems with the intake valve or clogging.
“The accelerator cable may also be faulty: and the exhaust pipe could have cracked and prompt drag from underneath. But alas, certain vehicles just come to the end of their operational lives in this manner. I advise you to purchase a Japanese car which seldom break down so you won’t have this unhappy experience again.”
So that’s why there are seldom ‘agony uncles’!
Confessions of the rich and famous
The TV presenter, actor, writer and all-round brilliant polymath Stephen Fry has confessed to a dazzling number of locations in which he has taken cocaine, including Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, the White House, and many other grand addresses. Oh, very amusing. And because he’s rich and famous he’ll get away with it: the poor, the mules, the women driven to prostitution in the drug trade are not so fortunate.