Online Dating Is Easy, But Successful Relationships Require Hard Work

My nineteenth anniversary will be here in a week and a half.

So what’s so exceptional about that in Mormon Utah? Just this: I
have a mail-order husband. He has a mail-order bride.

Nineteen years ago, there weren’t any dating sites online; in
fact, there wasn’t any online to put them on.

So I bought a copy of the Mensa directory and went systematically
through every male in the book, looking at the coded information
for men within five years one way or the other of my age, widowed
or divorced (because a man who is 40 and has never married has
something wrong with him), shared my religion, shared at least
three interests, and was in biorhythm sync with me at lest half
the time.

I wound up with ten names.

I prepared letters to each of them and, despite my
fourteen-year-old daughter’s “Mom, you’re not going to MAIL
those letters. MOM, you’re not going to mail those letters. Mom,
you’re NOT going to mail those letters,” I mailed them.

I got four responses: a gay man, a man who had been
excommunicated for being caught in bed with his sister-in-law, a
teacher who had been in the Peace Corps in Africa and wanted to
go back to Africa and “Gee, you must make a lot of money writing
mysteries.” The fourth was Tom.

I sat down in the living room laughing as I read the letter from
Tom.

When my father asked what was so funny, I said, “Daddy, I think
I’m going to marry this man.”

Ten years ago online dating services still weren’t available.

But my favorite college student, out of all the students I
taught, met a man from Australia on a science fiction website.
They were married five months later. Heidi moved to Australia and
so far, has lived happily ever after. I met her husband a few
months ago, and I think she’s going to continue to live happily
ever after.

Two years ago, online dating services were going great guns. A
neighbor of ours, getting ready to move to Alaska and knowing the
male-female ratio there, signed up for the dating service. He and
his bride headed for Alaska two weeks after getting married and
are still there.

What do I think of online dating services? I think good ones are
great.

I often hear people say “I fell in love at first sight.” But
they didn’t. What they fell into was lust. Good arranged
marriages during Medieval and Renaissance times worked better
than most marriages spawned in our modern age – online or
offline.

A good dating service can do just what I did, only a lot faster
because it can use the computer. It can match people for what
they identify as important to them. It can screen out pairs that
look surface compatible, but have underlying incompatibilities.

When Tom and I married, we were not yet in love with each other.
But we knew that we had enough things in common that we could
build a workable marriage. That is what we did, and we grow more
in love with each other every day.

An online dating service can’t provide someone you can love at
first sight, but it can provide someone with whom you have enough
in common that you can build a workable marriage. You just have
to do the work.

Copyright (c) 2009-2012 Denice Ritter
NSA Dating Site
http://www.nsadatingsite.com/

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Denice Ritter lives with her husband Tom in Utah.
She teaches at the local college and writes freelance
in her spare time. If you are looking for online adult
dating opportunities, she recommends the website:
http://www.nsadatingsite.com/