Sure, the Internet has made dating and mating an easier game. And it has its definite perks — it is adventurous, sexy, it has its thrills, and it provides multiple opportunities to experiment outside of the traditional ‘been there done that’ options that you may have begun to find jaded and mundane.

A handsome Australian, a dashing Italian or a Brazilian beauty are now just a click away! You can also find a spouse online, confined no longer to a newspaper’s matrimonial columns or relatives suggesting ‘eligible’ partners. But anything that is too good to be true usually is. Too good to be true that is.
More often than not, people pretend to be someone else on the net. They use pictures of other people as their profile pictures or pictures of themselves when they were twenty years younger. Some years ago, the 1-900 numbers to call for sex chats were timely diversions for frustrated men, replete with women whispering sweet nothings on the phone. It was a paid for service. Today a stranger posing as somebody else can get you to do that free. You can chat sweet nothings to him or her without any emotion getting in the way — a fantasy part — always supportive, always there to chat or listen. While a real world partner helps with day to day mundane chores, daily life issues, and helps maintain emotional balance in the relationship. The ‘fantasy’ partner, being just a click away, can possibly be the reason you become unfaithful to your partner.
This is the Internet that enables people to hide behind façades and pose as people they are not. And pursue their aims as hackers, stalkers, identity thieves and frauds. Common sense should tell us all that we need to verify and check the people we talk to online before we commit to anything. Online relationships are most often empty and devastating.
The worst side-effect of the information age is that you find men and women in committed relationships swearing undying love to each other even as they are busy cruising the net in their second lives — evaluating options, chatting, visiting date rooms and Twitter and Facebook to have a passionate tryst with veritable strangers. It makes a relationship shaky. This is a different kind of unfaithfulness and has pushed up the rate of divorce and infidelity monumentally. People all over are going for mates with nearly no net identity.
Through the Internet, people can literally have alternate personalities — avatars where they communicate with ease, and with affectations and pretentions that are far removed from their realities. One runs the risk of finding that they are not what they describe themselves to be, to the point that they may not even be the gender they claim. And of course the name and address or even the location or country may be fabricated. The worst is that they may be using someone else’s ‘hacked’ account and pose stylishly in front of a car displayed in a showroom.
It is time we woke up to the nether world of social network relationships, one that is dangerous to our real lives. If your online lover is truly ‘better’ for you then it’s just fair to come clean with your real life partner and let them move on to someone who will be a full time lover to them.
Did love and sex just get more complicated with the Internet?