An Online Dating Blog by Shimrit Elisar

Online communication and false intimacy

March 26th, 2007

I came across an interesting article today about the way mobile text conversations and online interaction supposedly affect teenagers’ views on relationships. By “interesting” I don’t actually mean intelligent and well thought-out, unfortunately.

Here’s an example:

Professor Doreen Rosenthal said mobiles and the internet had created an accelerating intimacy between adolescents, with many making relationship decisions more swiftly than previous generations. Electronic communication tended to shrink the time span in which friendships developed, leaving teenagers more exposed to risky decision-making.

The article seems to suggest that, as a result, teenagers get a “false sense of intimacy” and tend to sleep with each other faster than they otherwise would:

“For many teenagers, this acceleration of intimacy is occurring without the usual checks and balances of face-to-face contact. It’s a pseudo-intimacy. You don’t create genuine intimacy through these mediums.

As an online dating professional (and a former chatroom addict) I find the suggestion that you cannot create intimacy through online communication a bit last century, to say the least. Isn’t it time we stepped out of the dark ages? Yes, an online conversation doesn’t paint a complete picture (and I have already spoken about that here) but many people communicate better in writing and a written conversation between two people is no less a conversation than a spoken one. In online dating, you can learn a lot about a person while speaking to them online and, often, you can learn much of the rest on your first date (i.e. whether you’d like to sleep with the person)

If you follow professor Rosenthal’s line of thinking, you may be fooled into reaching the conclusion that spending time speaking to people online before meeting up face to face is a total waste of time. Bullshit. If the kids see each other at school every day or speak on the phone, then a few text/messenger conversations are not really going to make that much of a difference. They already know they want to sleep with each other, everything else is just an excuse.
What we have here is a basic misunderstanding of the way online communications work and a bit of the good old stigma we in the industry love to hate. It’s a shame such backwards views have made it into a book, really.

Blaming teenagers’ fast relationship cycle on texting and online communication is pretty dumb. Teenagers are at an age where they are beginning to explore their sexuality. Professor Rosenthal herself notes the fact that many teenagers nowadays have free access to porn, which influences the way they view sex. In my opinion, that is probably the reason while teenage boys (and some girls) are attracted to the concept of having multiple sexual partners and enjoying casual sex. If the kids learn about sexuality and relationships by watching porn, they’re going to have a pretty skewed idea about sex and relationships. Whether they talk about it in an email, on the phone or face to face, won’t really make a difference.
I’m not saying that teenagers should save themselves until they are married or only have one partner for the duration of their teenager years, but I’m pretty sure monogamy among teenagers used to seem a lot less uncool back when I was that age.
I was speaking to a teenage girl recently who told me the boy she fancied (16 years old) had told her he “wasn’t ready to commit yet”, I’m pretty sure boys didn’t use terms like that back when I was 16, but I’m also pretty damn certain it wasn’t text messaging that taught them the concept of casual sex.

Entry Filed under: Online Dating Rants, Relationships and dating