The purpose of this blog is as a venue for sharing stories for those of us who've given up on the traditional dating scene (whatever the reason) and sought love online. If successful, the idea is that international and internet love success stories can be shared on this blog page.
Although the embers of thought that constituted this idea have been swimming around in my head for quite some time, I owe its ultimate conception to an epiphany I shared with my fiancée while we were standing in the frozen section at the local grocery store. My fiancée is Thai, and we live in a very small, isolated community in Alaska. Needless to say, there aren't a lot of Thai people here in the community of 6,000 or so where we make our home, so when we met another Thai lady, Jikky (my aforementioned fiancée) and she rather quickly became friends. It wasn't long thereafter that the two ladies shared their "farang" (Thai for "foreign") dating stories, and--lo and behold--noticed quite a few parallels. We thought, "We didn't think we were the only ones!".
In this day and age there is a lot of cynicism regarding meeting and dating people on the internet. Really, there is a lot of cynicism about dating in general (I read an Onion article recently entitled, "Young Man Miraculously Finds Soulmate at Corner Convenience Store"), but internet dating seems to inhabit a particular region of the brain reserved for those ideas we regards with the heaviest skepticism. It's strange that we regard the idea of a soulmate (or someone with whom compatibility is so high that the relationship requires very little maintenance) seems an idea worthy of our derision. After all, is not the purpose of finding love something more than simply finding someone whom we find attractive and with whom we can share our genes? If that's all love and relationships boil down to, then why bother? But I digress.
If you subscribe to my theories regarding love, then you have to understand the astronomical odds of finding someone with whom one would be highly compatible--a soulmate partner. I did the math (found here) and found that the odds of finding one of the 871 or so people with whom one would be most compatible are .000000124, or about 124 per billion--that's a lower number than the concentration of most industrial chemicals allowed in drinking water. It's a sickeningly low--and frankly, discouraging--number. So, simply put, I thought the only way I could find this person was if she were looking for me, and looking for me in a similar manner to the way I was searching for her. Corollary to this idea, I figured if I wanted to catch the the "fish" of a lifetime, I'd better cast a pretty wide net (ergo the name of this blog), and there is no wider net than the internet.
The crux of this blog is so that Jikky and I, our friend and her husband, and people like us can share their internet dating success stories. There's a lot of bad stuff on the internet, a lot of bad people, deviants, and criminals that are simply looking to exploit the lovelorn for their own personal gain. Not everything out there is bad though, and I believe that if you filter through all of the trash, some true gems are out there to be found.
Share your story with me as a comment, and in a few days I will add mine.
Although the embers of thought that constituted this idea have been swimming around in my head for quite some time, I owe its ultimate conception to an epiphany I shared with my fiancée while we were standing in the frozen section at the local grocery store. My fiancée is Thai, and we live in a very small, isolated community in Alaska. Needless to say, there aren't a lot of Thai people here in the community of 6,000 or so where we make our home, so when we met another Thai lady, Jikky (my aforementioned fiancée) and she rather quickly became friends. It wasn't long thereafter that the two ladies shared their "farang" (Thai for "foreign") dating stories, and--lo and behold--noticed quite a few parallels. We thought, "We didn't think we were the only ones!".
In this day and age there is a lot of cynicism regarding meeting and dating people on the internet. Really, there is a lot of cynicism about dating in general (I read an Onion article recently entitled, "Young Man Miraculously Finds Soulmate at Corner Convenience Store"), but internet dating seems to inhabit a particular region of the brain reserved for those ideas we regards with the heaviest skepticism. It's strange that we regard the idea of a soulmate (or someone with whom compatibility is so high that the relationship requires very little maintenance) seems an idea worthy of our derision. After all, is not the purpose of finding love something more than simply finding someone whom we find attractive and with whom we can share our genes? If that's all love and relationships boil down to, then why bother? But I digress.
If you subscribe to my theories regarding love, then you have to understand the astronomical odds of finding someone with whom one would be highly compatible--a soulmate partner. I did the math (found here) and found that the odds of finding one of the 871 or so people with whom one would be most compatible are .000000124, or about 124 per billion--that's a lower number than the concentration of most industrial chemicals allowed in drinking water. It's a sickeningly low--and frankly, discouraging--number. So, simply put, I thought the only way I could find this person was if she were looking for me, and looking for me in a similar manner to the way I was searching for her. Corollary to this idea, I figured if I wanted to catch the the "fish" of a lifetime, I'd better cast a pretty wide net (ergo the name of this blog), and there is no wider net than the internet.
The crux of this blog is so that Jikky and I, our friend and her husband, and people like us can share their internet dating success stories. There's a lot of bad stuff on the internet, a lot of bad people, deviants, and criminals that are simply looking to exploit the lovelorn for their own personal gain. Not everything out there is bad though, and I believe that if you filter through all of the trash, some true gems are out there to be found.
Share your story with me as a comment, and in a few days I will add mine.
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