Online Dating

Hmm! I personally don’t like the phrase “Online dating” let alone the actual dating being done online.

Sure, we are now doing life more on a virtual world than on the real one. I worked for a company for five years without meeting the person who interviewed me and later became my boss. Why? There was no need for me and her to meet in person. The work was done perfectly and we both loved it! Why do we need to meet? No need!

Meeting people online is a good way to meet people whom we may not otherwise be able to, given our hectic lifestyle. However meeting people online, dating them online and later deciding to marry them to do marriage in the real world is a very tricky and risky business.

Life is not a slot machine where we insert a coin and wait for our luck. Choosing a person to marry is not like throwing a dice on the air for the dice to seal our fate. Some people genuinely believe that life is nothing but a matter of luck, leaving out any responsibility on their part. However, if we read our Bible carefully, we learn that God put life and death before us and He left “the choosing” part of it to us. That means, where we are now in life has a lot to do with our choosing than our luck!

Most people who believe in luck don’t accept any advice because luck and advice don’t go together. So, they tend to say, “Hey, it is God who decides my fate! I don’t listen to anyone’s advice!”

But the Bible says, “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.” (Proverbs 15:22)

Some say, “When I meet THE ONE whether online or face-to-face, my heart will tell me.”

The problem is the Bible says this about our heart: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

Wow! Why would anyone, then, want to depend on their heart that is deceitful?

So, instead of settling for luck or for our deceitful heart to seal our fate of finding THE ONE, it is always good to do dating, courting and marriage in the real world, with the help and counsel of others who are more spiritual than us.

But if a girl is dating a man online, how can she ask advice from others to see if her decision to marry the man is right or wrong? By showing them his pictures and his emails? Very tricky! Can she say, “He is a very kind man”? How does she know? By his text which reads something like this: “I always love to help people who are in need”? His love and passions have to be tested in real life scenarios; not in his text messages.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against the idea of meeting people online.

All I’m saying is this: When you think of dating people you meet online, it is good to meet them face to face before you even decide to date them. Once you meet them, see if he/she can be a potential spouse. If they are, do the dating and courting business intentionally and purposely in the real world (not in the virtual one). Then after that, with prayer and the counsel of others, you can take the relationship to a higher level, which is marriage. After all, we all agree that no matter how sophisticated and modernized we have become, we can’t marry and have kids online. I mean, we can make a joke and laugh about it, but in an actual sense, marriage and family have to be built in the real world, which is very different from the virtual world. If that is the case, why would anyone want to do the preparation for the real marriage life on virtual world?

If you are in the middle of an online dating, take your time and think hard and long about these things. Remember, people who reject advice ALWAYS “sow a wind in their life and reap a whirlwind”. You can find stories of those kinds of people in the Bible, starting from Cain. ///