One of the most stressful encounters a man or woman can have is interacting with people they don’t know. I’m not talking about polite conversation with a fellow co-worker or interacting with a classmate on a daily basis. The encounter I’m talking about is the attempted establishment of an intimate relationship with members of the same/opposite sex. Blind dates. Club night. Bar hopping. Speed dating.

For a limited handful of men and women, dating is easy. Nothing about the concept of going out and meeting random people in the hopes of connecting on a deeper level scares them.

One of the hallmarks of our technological generation is a process that, supposedly, makes the dating process much simpler. We’ve come to call this “online dating.” If anything, online dating is worse than the face-to-face variety.

There are hundreds of dating sites. Any demographic you can think of has some kind of online interaction site promoting the perfect place for finding what you want. Christian singles? Got it. Tattooed singles? Absolutely. Single parents? Definitely. A dating site for every cultural group under the sun? Of course.

With names like “Plenty Of Fish” and “Ok Cupid,” these sites pop up faster and faster every day. While the majority are “free” there’s always “upgrade” available for the more serious internet dater. One of the constant hallmarks of these “upgraded” accounts, that always have a fee attached, is that you will be able to browse potential matches incognito. Though it may seem like a good idea to delve into the internet dating pool, it is in fact an outright waste of time and a disappointment of potentially epic magnitude.

Rejection is something everyone understands in some way shape or form. Someone we like doesn’t like us. Someone we find attractive doesn’t find us appealing. The list is endless.

The perilous trap that comes with online dating is the friend connection. Everyone knows at least one person that found their “soulmate” on some no-name dating site. There’s always that one person who “made it work” and found their partner via the internet.

It’s this example, this “friend of a friend” instance, that gives hope to the teeming masses. No one warns you about the scammers, the “catfish” that frequent these sites and lead people on in the hopes of cheating them out of their hard earned money, or establishing a “long distance relationship” with a fictional person in the hopes of making themselves feel loved by a complete stranger.

Bite the bullet and go outside if you wanna meet people. Trust me. It’s better in the long run.