By Sandra L. Brown, MA
With the need to date fast and find quick relationships, on-line dating and the internet have taken on the role of ‘hook-up’ locations. Unfortunately, it is also a potential stalking ground for relationship seeking gone awry.
There are some inherent problems with on-line and/or internet relationship seeking:
- It is difficult to read body language, eye lingo, and verbal pacing of sentences via email.
- One of the ways people can keep themselves safe in dating relationships is to feel and respond to their red flags. Red flags are greatly reduced by the inability to see firsthand someone’s immediate response to statements or questions.
- Texting and email, which are usually how people first talk when they’ve met on-line or via the internet, impair the ability to get early insight into potential relationship problems.
- You never know, for certain, that the other person is really who they say they are.
People have created false senses of intimacy via on-line and internet relationships. I know of one woman who met a man from Iran on the internet and went there to marry him without ever having met him in person. It was a disaster and hard for her to get back to the States. He was nothing that he had represented himself as.
A false sense of relationship intimacy contributes to rapid disclosure of personal information. The relationship connection with someone on-line (that you have no idea if he is safe or not or who he says he is) becomes privy to a bulimic-like purge of personal problems and detailed information. This is very common for women to rapidly disclose, and over disclose, personal and historical information.
Dangerous and predatory men have stated that “women who rapidly and overly disclose make my approach easy.” Men who are not highly verbal in person may be very verbal online and the woman mistakenly perceives this as a relationship, connection, truth-based knowledge about the person, and intimacy.
These dating venues increase relationship fantasy–anyone can be whoever they want you to think they are, and someone you aren’t sure you will ever meet. The increase in non-credible information about someone is significantly higher. People can lie about where they live, their marriage status, previous relationship history, career, appearance, or criminal history.
People who are unhappy in their marriage find on-line and internet relationships to be the perceived escape out of misery they have been seeking. Many are disappointed (or even horrified) to find the relationship on-line is all fantasy and not much reality. Women have left husbands for on-line men who never materialize. When it comes to who the person or what the relationship is, they find it’s more about what the person has projected and fantasized the relationship to be – not what it really is or will become in the future.
In the beginning of on-line dating, many women report it’s how they found their current husband and are very happy with him. But as time has gone on, more and more predators and con artists have learned that it is an easy place to hide their true self and identities and use it to find their next victim.
While it is unlikely that on-line and internet relationship seeking will ever disappear, women need to understand the risks of using these methods for meeting someone and the ways they put a woman at a distinct disadvantage in reading body language, hearing the tone of voice, and being alerted to red flags.
Be vigilant in your attempts to get back into dating and stay safe!
(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)
