Online Dating
Internet has revolutionized the whole style of meeting new people. In countries like America, internet connections are available in most homes along with phone connections. In fact, many states also have free calling between local numbers. Can you imagine the huge potential for meeting new people over the phone then? Online dating is the latest fad of the twentieth century, but what before that?
The speed dating systems that gained immense popularity never really put restrains on the actual interaction between the individuals who wished to date mostly with a romantic interest. Therefore, many communication devices just eased the task of making two people meet, but they did not spell out any rules for the way the relation would develop. It never specified whether two people would become friends or a couple. At the very minimum, it posed the restriction of the inability to meet over distances, but that is a problem that can easily be sorted out, isn’t it? You just need to tell your date to meet you somewhere.
The complete relaxation of restrictions on the dating scene made meeting someone over phone a favorable concept.
Before online dating, some other quick dating systems that people relied on too were popular. Video
dating systems were a rage in the 1980s and 1990s where people performed a video on the VHS tapes. These videos were later viewed by the other interested party in private but in most cases, in the same facility.
The whole idea was to meet over the video, but not to bump into each others. Imagine the subtlety of the whole system, wherein service providers would alternate recorded tapes so that men and women would not recognize each others on streets!
Phone dating systems allowed people to call a common voice mail service.
Two singles could talk freely but they were charged rather heavily per minute. This system gained mass appeal in the 1980’s and 1990s though no one admitted to doing it!) The biggest problem with this system was that a differentiation between phone sex service and simple phone dating service was hard to make.
Phone sex is a sort of a horny porn facility where a female chats up with a male to arouse him, but does not intend to date him. Since the privacy of phone daters was protected, it was not easy to tell the difference between phone daters and phone porn partners.
In the later of the 20th century, computer dating was in vogue. In this system, customers filled out forms with a mention of their like’s dislikes and their preferences. These were later matched by a computer that held a record of many such prospective computer daters.