Your 1% Towards Making the Internet Safe
With all the talk lately about whether there’s a need for protection for Internet daters (I’ve written quite a bit: See one sample here), I’ve been thinking about the role of personal responsibility. The Internet is nothing more that a huge collection of folks just like us, sitting at computer terminals and typing away. So we all have a piece of responsibility in makeing what happens here safe and reliable.
I talked to a man the other day on the phone, an experienced Internet dater. I was explaining to him the advantages of the Yahoo! Personals Premier level of membership: to get a Premier seal on your profile, you have to be a paid member. (Knowing that someone has paid is an important piece of information, because paying implies seriousness. Also, on most sites, if you aren’t a paid member, you can’t respond to emails from prospective mates.) He retorted that he had no problem scamming Yahoo!, Match.com or any other dating site, because they all had plenty of money.
Frankly, I found his attitude appalling. To start out what you hope to be a life time loving relationship by cheating the business that is making it possible for your to meet possible mates seems designed to undermine your best efforts.
If you are a child of the 70’s like I am, you may remember the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s efforts to get the world meditating. The Maharishi believed that if just 1% of the world’s population were regularly meditating, we would have peace, or at least more of it.
Each 1% of us at those computer terminals, like meditators, can make a difference. How? If we all take it on ourselves to be honest, kind, and polite in our Internet dealings, 1% at a time, think of what a difference that could make overall. When might we reach the Tipping Point that Malcolm Gladwell describes, when honesty and reliability on the Internet would be so much the usual practice that one could simply assume that people were who they said they were?
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
