Why Is Online Dating Stigmatized?

Why Is Online Dating Stigmatized?

Online dating may be stigmatized in a few circles today, but it is in no way as stigmatized as it used to be in its early days.

Back then, it was stigmatized because it was something that wasn’t very familiar to people.

When people aren’t aware of the nature of something, they tend to fear it and thereby stigmatize it as a result.

Online dating went against what most people were taught about courtship.

Most people in the earlier days before online dating were taught that you met people through trusted friends, family, work, school, etc.

Hence, this was the norm for most people.

When online dating came along, it instantly became stigmatized because it went against the norm of what we had all been taught about dating and courtship.

It also came along in the early days of the internet.

This caused it to be even more stigmatized because it was coming through a medium that was also not very familiar at the time.

Most people communicated via their phones or through letters before the internet came along.

Internet was a major change and at first, people didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Hence, here was a situation where you had people who were unsure of this whole internet thing and on top of that they also had to contend with this new mode of dating or meeting people through the internet.

This only made things that much more difficult for online dating in the beginning.

Online dating was an unknown entity and like a lot of unknown entities, it caused doubt and caution.

The concept of meeting a complete stranger through the internet was incredibly foreign to most people at the time.

They would instantly create the worst case scenarios in their minds.

They suspected that anyone who tried to meet someone online would be risking their well-being as they could easily meet a criminal or a murderer.

They even would surmise that meeting people online was equal to having some social discrepancies as a person.

Hence, they would judge the people who did online dating as socially inept.

They would look at these people as awkward.

They would judge them as people who probably had no real friends or any kind of relationship building skills whatsoever.

These were some of the ways that online dating was stigmatized earlier on.

However, with the advent of technology such as smartphones and other different mediums of communication such as social media, the stigmatization of online dating became less common.

It started becoming the norm to use a smartphone to download apps.

Soon, some of those downloaded apps became dating apps.

The ease and speed in which a person could download a dating app and be instantly connected with someone that they could date nearby was too tempting and convenient.

As more and more people started using social media as their primary means of communication, they also became more and more comfortable with communicating with total strangers through the internet.

This is partly how they started becoming more and more open to online dating.

If they could talk to a total stranger through their social media, it wouldn’t be much of a leap to also talk to a total stranger through a dating app.

As more and more people started online dating and would have good experiences, the news would get around to other people who hadn’t tried online dating and who may have stigmatized online dating in the past.

Due to all these positive accounts about online dating, some of them decided to try it when they found that they were single in their real lives and weren’t having much luck meeting the right matches to date in the real world.

This behavior proliferated over time, leading to what we have in current society. We now live in a world where online dating is no longer stigmatized.

There is a good chance that you know someone or have a friend or family member who has actually done online dating in some capacity.

It has become as popular today as the other traditional channels of meeting people in the real world.