An experiment in 2D looks and 3D substance (dating, woman, attracted)

[jobaba]

I rolled out of bed and onto Facebook this morning and randomly clicked on the pages of one of my friends from college. Since we were not super tight and she lives on the opposite coast, I rarely see her and know few of her friends.

Anyway, I wanted to see if she had any cute friends. So I just started going through her friends list.

I was kind of surprised to find I didn't think that many of her friends were that cute ... and I started thinking to myself that my friends were actually more attractive, which was not likely in an objective sense since she is very social and I am an internet forum nerd.

Then it struck me that my Facebook friends seemed more attractive because I know them. I've met them in person. They represent a 3D object with depth where I can put a personality behind the photo. For my friends' friends, all I could see was a pic with eyes, nose, and lips.

Of course, she had some good looking friends that were clearly very attractive, but if that same person were my Facebook friend, she would be that much more attractive. It was strange. Even my Facebook friends who I don't even really like seem more attractive than if they were just a random picture because I can at least put some depth and substance behind the photo.

This also made me think ... wow, I really don't ever want to try online dating.

Lol. Try it. Maybe this is just all in MY head ... as usual.

[katykat01]

Great post! No, I don't think it's just you. I started online dating, but haven't been a big fan of it. Most people are not especially attractive on it, but you can't go entirely by a picture when judging someone, even though that's exactly what we do with online dating. And some people post so little that you have no idea about their personality, or they post so much pretentious crap that you don't want to meet them. It's just really hard to judge a person by an online profile.

While I was doing online dating, I was posting on a friend's Facebook page and noticed her friend who was kind of cute and who had posted on the same thread. I checked out his page and thought, "he's cute and he's really smart! I need to meet him!" So she set us up. He was drop dead freakin' gorgeous when I met him - pictures don't do him justice at all. And he had an awesome personality. Unfortunately, I guess he couldn't say the same for me because he never called. I've since seen his online dating profile. If it hadn't been for noticing him first on my friend's FB page, I would never have contacted him if I'd only seen his online dating profile.

I also saw the very limited FB profile of a guy I used to work with and it does him no justice. He's adorable, funny, sweet and ridiculously lovable. But if I had to judge him by his FB profile, I'd say "blah" just move on. It's a hard to get a good representation of a person online.

[Mikala43]

All that thinking before coffee isn't healthy.

[Thursday007]

The concept of Facebook and what you are describing is not new, in fact, it's 100s of years old. Most courtships happened via the written letter over a period of time. The more cerebral the connection, the more attracted they would become.

1800s playwrite George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "a paper courtship...perhaps the pleasantest and most enduring of all courtships."

Shaw was a literary Nobel winner and an Oscar winner in the same year. But some of his best writing took place with a woman by the name of Ellen Terry. Shaw and Terry met only once and carried on an affair through correspondance for almost 30 years. Even though they only lived maybe 20 minutes apart they chose not to meet out of fear of ruining the relationship they had.

In 1902 Shaw invited her to play Lady Cecily in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, a part he wrote with Ellen in mind. In her autobiography, she suggested that her letters must have been "good copy" because Lady Cecily's character came entirely from them. Ellen declined the part, but met Shaw for the first time at the opening of the production.

Ellen would then write, "He was quite unlike what I had imagined from his letters,"

The letter romance had its season. If Shaw and Ellen Terry grew more distant with time, they could at least enjoy the memory of an intimacy some never experience.

[TaoistDude]

I think it's obvious that since you know and like your friends, they have more "depth" to you and those depths give meaning to your relationship. It makes your own friends more attractive than people who look attractive but whom you don't know.

However, your conclusion about online dating is erroneous. The only purpose of the "online" part is to get to meet in "real" life, at which point the people you meet become 3D (whether or not your impression is positive or negative, it still takes on depth).