Another reason not to *date* anyone, ever. I must be really out of the modern loop. Does this really happen? Is this the way of it now? Let’s see….when you have a date with someone you also have a checklist, no, a litmus test of whether the person you’re considering to date is worthy of your attention.
1) The 20 thousand questions date
2) The background check
3) ?? WHAT NEXT?? Medical record review?
4) Mandatory E-Harmony type compatiblility testing?
If so, go the hell away. Don’t come back. Leave me alone.

Typing fingers have replaced sweaty palms. Computer chimes substitute for awkward silences. And Internet supersleuths who want to know what they’re getting into are phasing out the blind date.
“You can get online to research a person and find out who they are before meeting them,” says Bridget Koza of Colonia, N.J. “It’s never really a blind date anymore.”

Using the Web to research people before making contact is becoming the norm for many teens and twenty-somethings. They want to see everything from a potential date’s picture to his or her credit history. Love might be many things, but with the Web, blind doesn’t have to be one of them.

The day I find out this crap is happening, is the day I start dropping names off my AIM Buddy List. It’s one thing to be curious about someone’s past and present…but it’s quite another to use this information to judge the future.
Blind date? I guess there really is such a thing, me being the non-expert in such things. If it involves meeting people you’ve been friends with online but never seen in person, yeah, that would be a blind date. My idea of blind means having never *SEEN* the person, not this crap about knowing everything you really have no business knowing prior to the date.

“Technological improvements made possible another way of imagining human relationships,” says Sorin Matei, a communications assistant professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “Before, dating was the product of fate, luck and the quest for romance.”
Now, “some would-be daters want to imagine a world where you take the fate and luck aspects out and put in some sort of rationality.”

This would turn me off so much. To want to take away the fate and luck and quest for romance must mean the “would be dater” is hard up and boring. And selfish. I say these people will always be “would be’s”…and they deserve to be so.

“There are all kinds of services that allow anyone to do on-the-spot background searches,” Matei says. “The amount of information you can get on someone is just scary. These things have become so accessible and so cheap you can do lots of research.”

Web sites including Google, online social networks such as Thefacebook.com and online background searches allow people to check others out without having to leave their chairs.

Cheap and accessible isn’t the word. How about lazy? How about closing yourself into that box by eliminating people who just might be the one for you? A lot of information can be harvested about a person via all these background checks and all…but a lot isn’t. Like who the person really is; what their dreams and hopes are; how much fun someone is (or isn’t…)- just the simple things about another person that might make you crazy about them…this stuff cannot be reseached online.

That’s not necessarily a good thing, says Kathleen McNerney of Cincinnati. She says it’s “creepy” to know little details about a person before a first date. “Our culture is always seeking control, and we want to be in control of the situation,” she says. “We don’t want to trust someone blindly.”

And some old fundamentals still apply. “At the end of the day, what matters in dating is how well people get along and whether they’re attracted to one another,” says Chris Hughes, a Harvard student and co-creator of Thefacebook, originally a tool designed at Harvard to digitize the old-fashioned yearbook and provide interesting facts to allow the freshman class to get to know one another. “Technology can provide preliminary information, but it won’t transform the dating scene.”

McNerney agrees.

“Regular dating won’t disappear, and after a while I think people will revert back to it,” she says. “Technology can become alienating after a while, and people will want to sit down for a meal instead of at their computer screen.”

The whole idea of dating makes me want to go hide up in the mountains and never come out. But being a people person who really doesn’t relish the thought of being alone the rest of my life…I have to come out from hiding and see what’s out there. I’ll be damned if this is what I have to look forward to. All this technology will just add to my desire to alienate myself even more.

It’s weird that you can meet so many people with that computer screen, yet the thought of these people using this technology to “research” my life really turns me off. Why can’t people just ask each other the questions to get this info? If there is something more to the relationship than just a bland friendship, the answers will come.