“You realize that roughly 80% of all young people (trans or not) now meet their dates online, right?”
I’m old, 75. Is there a source for such stats? The on line dating that I hear about is almost always a failure.
Almost everything on-line is totally fake. You cannot built lasting relationships built on lies.
They don’t just date online; they coordinate all their “networking” activities online particularly if they don’t fit in with the cliques in school or geographically have difficulty doing it face to face.
My daughter has a circle of maybe 30 friends in real life who live in other towns and villages around here. We’re in a small town but it’s surrounded by other small towns, villages and farming hamlets.
They talk online a lot (a bit like hogging the phone in the 80s and 90s but with video conferencing) AND they meet up in person but the logistics of meeting up outside school are tricky.
Number of friends she’s got at her high school that live within a 30 minute walk from our house? Two.
This also explains why a lot of what us old buffers think might be online dating with leery strangers usually isn’t dating at all. They’re often using video calls in a group, like a Teams or Zoom meeting at work.
A middle aged pervert on the call would obviously look totally out of place if everyone else on the call was in the same high school peer group.
They totally understand the difference between this kind of social networking, and chatting to a random stranger on a forum (like most of us Freepers do).
Freeper relationships are fundamentally fake - the only guaranteed thing people have in common here is we log onto the same site and ostensibly have some common opinions on some ideological/political/religious topics.
I bet many long time Freepers have met up in real life, and not for sexy times. Why assume kids on Snapchat can’t do that too?
A good while after my wife of 25 years died, I started talking online to a woman in Fort Worth (170 miles away) who was widowed after her husband of 25 years had also died. I drove that 170 miles for our first date, after telling her that "I had a car and wasn't afraid to use it".
We celebrate our 18th year of marriage this November.
I had heard that stat several times. Pew Research found that 53% of young people met their partner online and 336 million people worldwide are now using them.
My husband and I met the old-fashioned way; through our parents, in person.
My son found his wife through a dating app. He was very clear in his profile: white conservative Christian male seeks conservative Christian female for serious relationship culminating in marriage. He put his profile picture up along with his Trump gear.
Three weeks later, a lovely young lady with long blonde hair and pretty blue eyes contacted him. They talked for several hours, met for their first date, and that was it. He’s a traditional masculine man and she’s a traditional feminine woman; it was a perfect fit. Two years later, they were married. It helps that they were both “as advertised.”
You’re right that folks need to be careful. But at 18, on your first-ever date, you’re a bundle of nerves thinking about how much fun you are going to have at an amusement park, not that some psycho and his creepy girlfriend are luring you there to kill you.