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Last Thursday I attended a fundraising dinner at Vinopolis for the charity YouthNet ( www.youthnet.org or www.thesite.org ), an organisation that offers support and advice to young adults on any imaginable subject through the internet. The evening, hosted by the charity’s Patron Martin Lewis, was to kick off a fundraising campaign to generate one million pounds over the next three years and started in great style raising nearly £300k from this event.

Vodafone generously hosted the table and invited me as their guest. I was introduced to those around the Vodafone table including Jane and Helen, two professional women in their mid to late thirties. Both women were successful senior managers for the same blue-chip organisation, enjoying ski-ing, and both owning expensive sports cars and bespoke jewellery.   (Jane’s ostentatious, Helen’s understated). To all intents and purposes very similar characters and clearly very good friends.  The only difference was that Jane is married (massive engagement ring with a stone the size of Gibraltar) and Helen is single, never married. The reason I mention Jane and Helen is because the conversation we proceeded to have was similar to a number conversations that I have had in the run up to my appointment and since starting at Match.com, namely that internet dating is unnatural and somehow scuffs the romantic glaze off the process of meeting a potential partner. I was talking to Helen about the possibility of signing up for the site. As a woman clearly in control of so many areas of her life I made the observation that surely this was just another pragmatic step and opened up her options and the possibility of meeting someone (something she made very clear that she wanted to do). Jane, somewhat boorish and full of red by this stage of the evening chirped in with the statement that internet dating was for ‘losers’ and that ‘fate and destiny’ where all you needed to have faith in.

“Helen is too lovely a person to be on her own, she just hasn’t met the right person yet. She will though it’s all down to fate and destiny.” Jane said,

“But Helen just said that she would have loved to have met someone several years ago, how long does she have to wait for ‘fate and destiny’ to kick in??” I asked

“I just know it will happen, it’s just a matter of time” Jane replied while Helen remained quiet but smiling.

“So are you saying that regardless of what she decides to do and how active Helen is in the process of finding someone fate and destiny has someone is store for her?”

“Yes, she’s too lovely to be on her own?”

“What about free will?” I said “Doesn’t her own ability to make choices affect her destiny, if she decides to go and sit down a well for the next 20 years will fate and destiny make sure Mr Right goes and finds her there?”

“I just think fate will lead her into the right relationship” Jane continued

“If life is somehow pre-ordained than arguably we don’t have any choices to make, we can just sit back and wait for life to flow over us. Life is just not like that, we make our own choices. And who has decided on Helen’s fate and who has prescribed her destiny? Who has made all these choices for us, who is this Grand Designer, pre-ordainer of fateful events. I’d like to have a word with that guy???”

“I’m not saying there’s a designer just that fate will make it happen for her”

“How can this thing “happen” and this elusive order of the universe play out if someone isn’t doing the planning, it just doesn’t make sense??”

“Oh, I know what I mean, I just mean things happen for a reason and she doesn’t need to market herself on a computer to make that happen”.

You can see how the conversation was heading, into a cul-de-sac of fuzzy logic, poorly thought-out and alcohol fuelled philosophy. It really frustrates me when people defer to ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ but don’t follow through with what that means for free-will.  The conversation continued and the overall point I was trying to make is that I understand that not everyone is comfortable with the uses of the internet yet and are holding on to notions of how ‘romance’ should happen. The problem is that the notion of romance needs thinking through is that notion realistic and relevant for everyone? Just because people aren’t comfortable with the technology yet they should try and avoid making the leap of judgement and condemning the positive application of technology as somehow ‘unnatural’. I don’t think the internet and dating services can operate in isolation but I do think they are just another potential channel to connect people, help people meet and hopefully lead to romance.

I told them the story about a customer I spoke to 2 weeks ago to illustrate the point. This customer was a 50 year old divorcee (“husband ran off with a skinny tart from a council estate”) living in . She had been single now for 3 years and had yet to meet someone so thought she’d take her destiny in her own hands and join match.com after hearing the service talked about on GMTV. Now opposite where she lived there is a fire station and for those 3 years she had noticed one of the firemen going in and out of the station and never had the opportunity to chat or say hello. When she did a search in her area she was very pleasantly surprised to see his photo come up in the range of profiles and after getting in touch by email he responded. They have now been dating for 6 months. She feels she would never had the courage to speak to this man (after all she’d been waiting nearly 3 years) but the fact he was on the website meant he was receptive to the idea of meeting someone and the ability to reach out via email as a first step rather than face to face allowed her to break the ice in a more gentle fashion.

My argument was that most of the people I know that are single are not single because they wouldn’t be good in a relationship, aren’t funny, aren’t attractive, aren’t compatible with anyone …….truism as it is, they’re single because they just haven’t been able to meet anyone yet and that sometimes this is either because they are too busy; have exhausted the possibility of meeting friends of friends; don’t find the idea of trying to meet people in bars attractive, or because (mainly in the case of female friends) they have give themselves over to this Hollywood endorsed idea of a ‘Knight in shining amour’ (or whatever the modern day equivalent would be – a CEO is a shimmering Maserati?).  Their idea is that destiny has something in store for them, regardless of how they direct their energies. This is at best naïve and at worst misguided.  Surely a better approach would be to use all the possible options open to them (the internet being just one) and take a more pro-active approach to making love happen. I think part of the prejudice comes from people who are scared of the technology and default to the negative aspects of the internet and feel the realm of the web is somehow separate from ‘real’ life. Internet dating should be seem as an extension and addition to the other ways you may meet people and therefore the rules that apply here aren’t any different from the regular world ( chat to people you find attractive initially, get to know them and then meet up if you feel comfortable with them). Even if you do believe in fate surely this doesn’t mean that you have to be passive and inactive, couldn’t fate just as easily mean that your knight in shining armour could be surfing the web as easily as he might be just around the next corner waiting to sweep you off your feet. The two worlds are inextricably connected.  Surely this pragmatic approach to love rather than diminishing the romantic element of meeting someone can only enhance the possibility of finding that perfect someone. Surely, it’s the fact that we meet someone that is important, not how we meet them.